Are you rooting for someone to fail?

Admit it, you are.

That’s not very nice of you.

But we all do it.  We like to think that we all like stories of success.  But just as often, we enjoy a good story of failure.  The internet thrives on fails.  And maybe other people epic fails of themselves makes us feel a bit better about ourselves.  We root for failure when we feel people deserve it.

And the bigger you get, the more fans and customers and money you have, the more people want to see you go down in flames.  Success becomes your own worst PR.

I’ve been watching Celebrity Apprentice the last couple of months, and if you’re anything like me, you finally got your wish last Sunday when the insufferably egotistical, former sorority queen, long-overdue-to-fail-because-she’s-so-untalented-she-had-to-pose-for-Playboy-to-launch-her-music-career Aubrey O’Day was fired.   Best episode ever.

Stick around and succeed long enough, and people will begin to hate you, no matter what.

So, here’s my list of the top epic failures that everyone is rooting for…if only their legions of fans would get out of the way.

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I’ve been taught to believe in God all my life.

And I came to faith at a young age.  Sounds simple, right?

Well, it’s been a little more complicated for me.  For all the believing I’ve done, there’s been a lot of not believing.  Not believing doesn’t feel very Christian, does it?

See, for a long time, I thought I knew God.  I had never not believed in Him.  But then, without a whole lot of effort on my part, I started not believing things about God.  Huge parts of God’s personality, I just dropped.  The more I got to know God, the more things I didn’t believe about Him.  The things about God that I believed became fewer and fewer.

Many times when talking beliefs with atheists, they’ll start a sentence with, “I just can’t believe in a God that…”

And I say, “You’re right…”  I’ve got a lot in common with the atheists.

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What kind of marriage do you have?

Among some realms of Christian blog-land, you’ll see a lot of discussion on marriage.

The question: is your marriage “complimentarian” or “egalitarian?”

At stake, judging by the ferocity of the discussions, is the very sanctity of marriage.  I can’t think of one thing that gets Christians more hot and bothered about other peoples’ relationships, (other than maybe whether the couple in love have matching genitals or not.)

The way the question is usually posed, the “complimentarians” are old-fashioned, evangelical patriarchs who favor imposing artificial hierarchies to keep control over women.  That sentence was so full of buzzwords, it even made me a little bit mad.

Meanwhile, the complimentarians paint a picture of egalitarians as being in rebellion against God’s plan and being a bunch of bra-burning liberals.

And, as usual, the whole debate has become an exercise in missing the point.  If we actually defined “complimentarian” and “egalitarian” correctly, there would be no more discussion.

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Jesus can make some situations pretty awkward.

A few summers ago, I found myself on the downtown streets of my city.  Yes, I was passing out tracts.  Yes, I was asking people if they knew where they would end up if they died that night.  I was doing this under compulsion, for the purpose of passing evangelism class in seminary.

The first night had gone horribly, because I had paired myself with a guy equally awkward at this as me.  So the second night, I latched onto a guy who was like the chief boy scout of evangelism.

Not that we made any converts that night.

Since then, the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses and even some Baptists have knocked on my door, and none of them look like they’re actually expecting any more success at sharing their faith than I did.  But I take heart in this: Jesus did some amazing miracles.  He had some great teachings.

But he would be terrible at this.  Jesus was not a good evangelist.

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The internet is a great tool…for wasting time.

Yeah, Al Gore’s invention gets a lot of flack.  Thanks to the interwebs, we now have a million little distractions right at our fingertips.  We have Lolcatz and Facebook, and websites with endless lists of utterly useless facts that keep us glued to our screens for hours.

Most of us in blog-land try to “unplug” for vacations, or at least a couple of weeks a year.  But the guy in this video is taking it to the next level.  He’s leaving the internet entirely behind…for an entire year.  Anything that would involve computers communicating with each other is strictly non-kosher.

It made me think, maybe all the time I waste online is cancelled out by the time I’m saving.  Hmmm…

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Wow.

Thank you so much for such an inspired, candid conversation about bullying the last couple of days.  Lots of great stories were shared, and I don’t thank you often enough.  Thank you for making this blog what it is with your insights and candor.

Strangely, the whole topic of bullying led me to an unexpected thought for today’s post.

There are a whole lot of Jesus’ words that we have preserved.  We have them printed in red ink, highlighted, underlined, and quoted in endless devotionals.

Jesus, in one of his classic public speaking flubs, mixes up his words and claims that it is better to give than to receive.

But we still ignore them.

For whatever reason, Jesus said a lot of things that we just don’t take seriously.  Maybe we think Jesus was speaking figuratively, or with hyperbole.  Or he just wasn’t talking to us.  Or he’s just full of it.  Whatever the reason, there’s a whole lot of red words that might as well be changed back to black.

Here are my favorite words and teachings of Jesus to flat out ignore.

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